Credit card accounts and other similar financial service accounts are ubiquitous in modern commerce. Whether they use electronic payment methods such as debit cards, credit cards, prepaid cards, or stored value cards, or use a service provider with an underlying link to a payment account, such as PayPal®, consumers use financial service accounts for their convenience at a point of sale and for the ease of consolidating payback options. Many consumers find that paying one single entity at the end of each billing cycle (e.g., a financial service account provider, such as a bank) is much easier than paying numerous creditors by check.
As financial and information technology industries have evolved, so have the options that financial service account providers and merchants offer consumers. Consumers typically carry many financial cards linked to different financial accounts, such as traditional credit cards, debit or check cards linked directly to a checking account, and loyalty cards issued by merchants to recognize and reward frequent consumers.
To persuade consumers to use a particular financial service account, companies may offer incentives to customers to persuade them to purchase more items, try a new item, or visit a retailer more frequently. Coupons, rewards points, and advertised sales are all common methods of incentivizing consumer behavior. In recent years, some advertisers, merchants, and financial account providers have begun to incentivize the behavior of consumers via a card-linked offer. Card-linked offers, which comprise a wide variety of discounts or offers tied to financial service accounts, are generated by merchants, financial service account providers, and advertisers, and are placed directly onto payment cards linked to financial service accounts held by consumers. For example, a customer purchasing an item may find at checkout that their purchase is automatically discounted by their financial service account provider based on the coupon, discount, or promotion or is entitled to a discount on a future purchase.
While helpful for consumers, conventional card-linked offer systems and processes lack uniform mechanisms for evaluating and reporting the relative success of a particular offer campaign. Whereas standardized reporting metrics such as Gross Ratings Points (GRPs), Cost per thousand impressions, and Cost per Click (CPC), are routinely used to quantify the baseline cost and success of advertising campaigns in media and online, no such metrics currently exist for the card-linked offer industry. This deficiency hampers the growth of the financial services industry because card-linked offer card-linked offers because providers cannot be substantively compared to one another. Financial service account providers and merchants may have difficulties in selecting and evaluating these providers, and the positive impact to an advertiser cannot be effectively compared to other forms of marketing and advertising.